Funeral Home Acquisition and SBA Underwriting Model – Excel XLSX

BENEFITS OF THIS DOWNLOADABLE EXCEL DOCUMENT

1. Builds revenue from call volume times a blended revenue per call across traditional burial, cremation with service and direct cremation, so you underwrite the mix rather than the raw call count.
2. Recognizes bad debt as an explicit line and hires a licensed funeral director to replace the working owner, producing a true DSCR of 1.36x against the naive 1.89x.
3. Treats the pre-need backlog as future coverage funded into trust or insurance rather than current cash flow, so you do not pay a current-earnings multiple on it.

INTEGRATED FINANCIAL MODEL EXCEL DESCRIPTION

Funeral Home Acquisition and SBA Underwriting Model is an Excel template (XLSX) with a supplemental PDF document available for immediate download upon purchase.

Most funeral-home templates are startup or operating forecasts, and most brokers headline a call count. But the earnings of a single-location funeral home hinge on revenue per call, and the service mix is moving. This is a five-year, lender-ready model for buying one location with an SBA 7(a) loan, and it reads the firm the way a disciplined buyer and a lender do: on blended revenue per call, on normalized SDE, and on the trend.

The engine is call volume times a blended revenue per call built from three service types, each at its own price: a traditional burial, a cremation with a service, and a low-cost direct cremation. On the base case the blended revenue per call is about $6,082 at a cremation rate of about 63%. Direct cremation is roughly 25% of the calls but only about 10% of the revenue, which is the value dilution a seller's raw call count hides. The US cremation rate is around 63% and rising toward roughly 82% by the mid-2040s according to NFDA, so a firm can look busy while its revenue per call quietly erodes.

Three corrections separate this from a broker's sheet. Bad debt and uncollectibles are recognized as an explicit line, because families do not always pay and insurance assignments get written down. A licensed funeral director is hired to replace the owner who works the calls, meets the families and sells pre-need. And the price is set on SDE after both, not on the seller's owner-free, no-bad-debt number. The result is a true DSCR of 1.36x printed next to the naive broker DSCR of 1.89x; the gap is the director and the bad debt.

Pre-need is treated as pipeline, not cash. The backlog is real, but it is funded into a trust or an insurance policy and recognized at need, over years. A lender will not treat it as today's cash flow and you should not pay a current-earnings multiple on it, so the model prices the at-need business and shows the backlog separately as future coverage. A toggle switches between a leasehold base case, with rent in overhead and a ten-year term, and a fee-simple purchase of the building and any crematory, added to the uses on a twenty-five-year term.

The down-case is the one that matters in this sector: an eight-point mix shift toward direct cremation plus a 4% call slip drops coverage to 0.88x, below the 1.25x floor, because staff, facility and fleet costs are fixed. Profitable today, under pressure as cremation rises.

Ten sheets, every calculation a formula, Google Sheets safe and no macros, plus a PDF user guide of more than twenty pages and a benchmarks sheet with sourced ranges. Three firm profiles, burial-traditional, balanced community and cremation-forward, reload the multiple, the working-capital peg, capex and the bad-debt rate. No IRR is printed, deliberately, because on one small deal it is hostage to the exit multiple. Educational planning tool, not financial, legal, tax or investment advice.

Source: Best Practices in Integrated Financial Model Excel: Funeral Home Acquisition and SBA Underwriting Model Excel (XLSX) Spreadsheet, ProformaWorks